A survey suggests that, as a demographic, British women in their late twenties and early thirties actually spend more time online than men of the same age group. I wonder what effect this will have on the sort of adverts we see deployed on popular sites, especially as it’s becoming increasingly plain that television is losing its former status as the preferred media platform for many people? But if further evidence of this ongoing trend is needed, I humbly submit the phenomenon of people registering domain names for their children long before they’ll be old enough to bash out their first blog post.
A plague on both your guilds – researching epidemics in World of Warcraft
We’ve heard about the street finding its own use for things, but here’s an example of the opposite occurring: epidemiological researchers are in discussion with the makers of World of Warcraft to arrange a for a contagious virtual disease to sweep the multiplayer world, so that they can observe how people react to various social countermeasures like quarantining. Brings a whole new meaning to bugs in the code. [Image by Rance Costa]
Welcome to the United Kingdom of Ubiquitous Surveillance
Call me all the rude versions of “paranoid liberal” you want, but I’m getting very distressed at my homeland’s propensity for spying on its own citizens. The silent airborne surveillance drones I mentioned a while ago are now being used to maintain order at music festivals. And while you can argue that there’s a degree of reasonable logic to that, you can’t say the same for the school uniform manufacturer that is seriously considering producing a range of bugged clothing to enable parents to know where their kids are at all times. [Image by RightIndex]
I never realised that freedom was a finite resource; it would appear the failed efforts of our glorious leaders to export it to the Middle East have led to a major deficit at home. But hey, why worry? After all, if I’m doing nothing wrong, I have nothing to fear, right?
Right?
Hugo Awards website launched
The most venerable awards of the science fiction scene have finally caught up with the future – ladies and gentlemen, the Hugo Awards Online. I wonder if they’ll be activating the comments function for the inevitable calls of controversy after this year’s announcements? [BigDumbObject]
SpaceX updates
SpaceX is Paypal founder Elon Musk’s private space program. Spacefellowship has a round up of the growth the company is experiencing, the hint that NASA is moving towards a 1930’s postal service styled support of private space (ie: paying a small company to provide cargo service to the space station and maybe then manned service instead of paying for all the tech and research themselves, almost a prize oriented approach), and is already getting some big contracts.
For all that we dog on NASA, NASA’s looking toward SpaceX in this matter is nothing short of revolutionary, and SpaceX’s leads into creating a private space program are pretty amazing.